(If your name is Sarah W. stop reading now, unless you don’t care about being surprised about your shower favors.)
Everyone else, welcome to my latest adventure in creating fun, personal and inexpensive favors for a friend’s bridal shower. Sarah is a grad school friend and much of our friendship was forged while eating tacos and drinking margaritas at a local place near the University of Delaware. If you’ve been to grad school you know how important tequila can be to your survival. If you haven’t been to grad school, you may not fully understand. Anyways, we are having Sarah’s shower at a Latin restaurant in Pittsburgh PA this weekend and the margaritas will be flowing! I’m very excited about this location as it is uniquely Sarah and the food is delish. Because the location suits the Bride so well, myself and the MOH Lora wanted to be sure the invites and favors also felt like Sarah. I designed the invites using a template from WeddingPaperDivas.com and the finished favors can be seen below, read on to learn how I created them myself and just how little they cost!
A few weeks ago, I began to brainstorm about these favors and decided to give each guest a margarita magnet and a recipe card with my margarita drink recipe on it. So I went onto the internet and started to look into buying margarita magnets in bulk. To get about 30 magnets was $2 or $3 per magnet, which seemed like a lot. As I was looking at the magnets I realized they looked a lot like buttons I make at work to use for recognition for students, just with magnets on the back and not pins. I wondered to myself if I could buy buttons with magnet-backs instead of pin-backs and then use my work machine to simply press them together. I went to our typical button supply company BadgeAMinit.com and lo and behold they do sell magnet back buttons. I was even able to find a better price with MrButton.com, so I purchased my own supplies and set out to create margarita buttons. In order to do this you would need a button press like this one (they are expensive, but if you have access to one already, supplies are reasonable, or if you would use it often it would be a good investment – fundraising as well as craft options with these things are endless):
Here are my supplies and the invite I used as inspiration.
Using simple clip art and my color printer I created these first:
I forgot to take a picture when these were in paper form, but below you’ll get to see the process start to finish. After creating the margarita magnets, I thought they looked great! At that point, I planned to write out index cards for each guest with my margarita recipe on them. I mentioned this to a coworker and she said “Can you put the recipe on a magnet?” and I thought well there’s a great idea! And I was able to format the recipe using text boxes in publisher to create these:
Next I went about making these recipes into magnets. You load the button press with the back sharp side up, then a metal disc sharp side down, then the artwork face up (like one of the recipes) and then a plastic clear disc, then simply press. The resulting button can than have a magnet simply stuck on the back. The supplies I ordered came with self-adhesive magnets but you could use a glue gun to secure them. The recipe magnets turned out great! I color coded them to showcase 4 recipes: Classic, Cadillac, Gold and Mango. Here is the result:
All my buttons are stacked up and ready to travel to Pitt!! Each guest will receive a margarita magnet as well as their choice of 1 of the 4 recipe magnets. All 50 magnets cost only $21 to create!!! I really hope Sarah loves them as much as I do.
Something Blu Diaries 